What I cooked last night.

That mountain is actually a series of small ones, an observation I might already have made in the post about Miss Marple’s Tearooms; or the one about the transcendent slope of land in that cool, shady, towering canopied garden of Eden that bears the kindergartenesque name of ‘Dandenong Ranges’.  Garden of Eden? Indeed, during the Hurdy Gurdy days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the steep, winding roads to the villages and hamlets of the Dandenongs echoed not just to the bellbird’s transcription and the kookaburra’s machine-gun burst, but also to the staccato approach of the tangerine Volkswagen Kombis that clattered their way up the impossible slopes; transporting their orange-tinged loads of pumpkins and kaftans and hippies to the share-houses and rental bungalows - or their Camberwell-based parents’ holiday houses - for weekends or entire summer holidays of mountain-air-flavoured curried lentil feasts with a backdrop of progressive rock played on  woodgrain Kenwood stereog...

I left the room quietly - probably for the last time; its lonely sunrise mural gazing down on the room’s first utter emptiness, save for some kind of eighties carpeting, since the house was built in the sunshiny days of optimistic postwar Melbourne, when steamrollers roamed the bare streets, their sibilant screams heard from afar as they subjugated hot tar over a recalcitrant basalt plain turning it inch by inch into yet another suburb. I shut the door and moved on to the next room. This would be harder. Clearing my own once-bedroom, although long occupied by others, held a dilution of fascination for a personal past, a lost but remembered history, a shrine of memories; but mine alone, so no need of any sentimentality. The bathroom was different. My eyes stripped away the inert detritus and saw my father, silent in front of the mirrored cabinet door, spring morning light scintillating through two textured glass windows and projecting on pale blue walls and ceiling like the surface of a...